Success in School Starts with Respecting the Teacher

I caused some trouble in school. My regular readers may find this hard to believe, but I talked back a little too much — argued a little more than maybe I should have. Questions and comments are one thing, but a teacher can’t teach a class with one kid trying to stage a full-dress debate about every issue. I did that once, or twice (or a few thousand times). My teachers needed to get me to stop talking so I could listen, and learn something.

But my whole life was blessed by great teachers. I spent some years in public school, and some in parochial schools. I had some teachers I liked, and others I didn’t, but they all had their ways of handling my, well, let’s call it “energy.” I didn’t know exactly what they were doing at the time, but my good teachers all had methods to establish discipline, re-direct disruption, or capitalize on interruptions, as the situation required. I learned, and so did the class.

These teachers were experienced professionals. Multiplying the hours they had spent in front of classrooms by the number of students in each class would have produced stupendous figures. They knew what I was doing before I did it, and made sure I got a good education despite myself. They had all the advantages — beyond long experience, they had training in what they were doing. They were more than a match for one hyperactive kid. Great teachers know how to control a class and command the respect they need to do their job.

Thanks to my teachers, I learned about math, economics, science, english and a bunch of other subjects — but not about the subject of education. People don’t usually study education if they don’t plan to go into it. That should tell us something about political efforts to “fix” education. There are a few trained educators we’re lucky to have serving in the West Virginia legislature. But we don’t have nearly enough of them for what Charleston sometimes tries to do.

For some reason, lawmakers treat education differently than other subjects. We have neurosurgeons in West Virginia. Their practice of medicine is regulated in general terms, but you won’t catch our Delegates trying to tell surgeons how to open up someone’s skull to remove a brain tumor. We’ve got engineers in West Virginia — likewise, they have some general rules, prescribed by law, to follow. But you don’t see our Senators out there trying to tell qualified engineers where to put pilings into the riverbed to build a bridge — it wouldn’t even occur to politicians to try that.

But when it comes to teaching, somehow, everyone believes he or she is a world-class expert. This winter, we had people without a lick of training in education trying to micromanage curriculum, lower standards for the teachers entering our classrooms and turn the public education budget over to private companies. There are bound to be right ideas about changing our education system, and there are for sure wrong ideas. I’m not here to judge which is which. But I would like to state one idea about education reform:

We will fix education the same way we got an education: by learning to respect our teachers.

West Virginia has thousands of dedicated, experienced professionals working their tails off in one of the toughest jobs there is. Too many kids come to school hungry, hurting, and without the support at home they need to learn — things beyond the control of the best teachers. Many of the teachers we’re fortunate to have could make 20 percent more in Maryland or Virginia, but stay here because they care about West Virginia’s children. Nonetheless, armchair experts in education point the finger at our teachers time and time again, and whatever else you want to call that, it is disrespectful.

If we are going to learn enough in West Virginia to fix the schools in West Virginia, we need to start by listening to our teachers instead of constantly running them over, running them down, and running them out of this state. Our efforts should be led, not by people with the slick political savvy that wins elections, but with the real classroom experience that educates children.

Let qualified, experienced educators tell us what they need to be more successful. Let caring, veteran teachers take us to school on where the real problems lie. And let politicians who think they know more than maybe they really do — like someone I used to know — spend a little more time learning from teachers and a little less time talking about teachers.

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